Racing on the Forefront of Blockchain Gaming — AMA Highlights | Battle Racers

Earlier this week, we had a very insightful AMA session with Gabby Dizon, Patrick, and Monika Guballa from Altitude Games, along with the co-host Siddhartha Jain, the head of developer relations at Matic Network. The Altitude team was about to launch their next chapter of Battle Racers at that time — the presale of Season One is now live and you can finally get early access to the game! 

Everyone was invited to ask the team questions. We covered just about everything from their vision and challenges of building a blockchain-based game to the future of blockchain gaming, and more. We were greatly inspired by all the thought-provoking questions raised by our amazing community. And again, we appreciate the team for taking the time to share their truthful and valuable thoughts on all these topics. Thank you for your insights!

Here are the highlights of the AMA just in case you missed it. 

Who Are the Buidlers Behind the Battle Racers?

Gabby: Hello everyone, I'm Gabby Dizon, CEO and co-founder of Altitude Games, and the developer of Battle Racers. I’ve been a game developer for almost 17 years, in blockchain since 2017. Nice to meet you all!

Patrick: Hi guys, Patrick from Altitude Games, I'm the product manager of Battle Racers. in the past, I was in games marketing and publishing. Happy to answer your questions :)

Battle Racers — Everything You Need to Know About the Much-Anticipated Game, In-Game-Items, and Free-To-Play…? 

What are your plans for the items in the Battle Racers game to be truly valuable? I often take part in giveaway game items but the price doesn't match the estimation, I hope you don't "depend" on pay to win. 

Gabby: Excellent Question! One thing that sets us apart from many other blockchain games is that we don’t have any breeding mechanics and thus are not prone to inflation that can come with it. 

We plan to drive the value of our NFTs by setting the stage and creating the right game mechanics. We attribute different stats to each NFT, based on rarity and function. Those NFTs are forming a car that players can use to race against others. In order to compete, not only is it essential to hone your skills and decide when to use your power-ups (think Mario Kart) but also you’ll have to improve the stats of your cars by upgrading its parts. 

We will sponsor tournaments in the future to keep things interesting and give players a good reason for an arms race. 

Why do you choose the presale model instead of a free-to-play? Do you think the free-to-play model works for the blockchain game right now and why? 

Gabby: Blockchain games are still in its infancy, and it's business model is constantly evolving. It’s hard to do pure free-to-play because you are issuing out valuable NFTs on the blockchain, and giving free assets means someone can make a script and take millions of your items, rendering them worthless. Putting assets on a sidechain actually allows us to evolve towards a free-to-play model by having blockchain assets that are extremely low cost to produce and free for the player to try out, which is something we are experimenting with in the near future.

Is there a bonus and referral program? Can I sell my car to another member? And can I try to play for free without buying a car?

Monika: Yes, we do! If you have an Ethereum wallet address and connect it to our website, you’ll get a unique referral link on the Season 1 Sale page. Note that it’s only for ETH transactions. As for selling your car, you can trade parts on OpenSea. 

After you’ve opened a previously purchased crate from our sale, its contained erc721 parts will appear in your inventory on our site, from where you can transfer them from Sidechain to the Ethereum Mainnet and offer them on OpenSea. Here’s a guide on Medium that explains the whole process. 

And yes, you could definitely play for free on our Practice tracks using some Test Drives, which are sample cars in the garage that rotate from week to week.
 

The Big Picture — Technology, Partnerships, and the Ethereum Ecosystem

How will the recent partnership between Matic Network & Battle Racers affect the future of the blockchain gaming ecosystem? Do you think we will see more game devs migrating towards building on sidechain based scaling solutions? 

Gabby: I think that Ethereum + Sidechain is the natural step for blockchain games to adopt. Ethereum itself has the most dapp and developer adoption, but we need a sidechain environment like Matic Network to provide gas-free transactions, fast transaction times and make the blockchain disappear in the eyes of the end-user.

Sid: Our goal is exactly that! To ensure that the user does not even know that the application uses a blockchain. The transition from Web 2.0 to dapps should be extremely smooth in order to realize mass adoption. Once other developers witness the games deployed on Matic and the user experience they can offer, the devs would definitely want to deploy their games on Matic as well. Layer 2 solutions like Matic will play a huge role in taking blockchain games mainstream.

Why do you choose to work with Matic? Once Ethereum 2.0 launches, how is it going to change the Ethereum community, especially for the side chain / second layer projects? 

Gabby: We chose to work with Matic for 2 reasons: 

1. The tech;

2. Their community focus. 

The tech of the Matic sidechain will allow us to serve more users without being bottlenecked by gas fees or transaction times. Further than that, Matic also has a great community and partner focus which has allowed us to extend our reach to a new player base and grow our community of players at Battle Racers.

I'd like to know more about the Battle Racers with Decentraland, Matic, and Ethereum stack.

Gabby: Battle Racers uses the ERC721 non-fungible token standard of Ethereum. However, we mint the NFTs on the Matic sidechain first, so that players can use the NFTs with fast transactions during gameplay. Players can then opt to transfer their NFTs from Matic to Ethereum mainnet and trade on Ethereum marketplaces, such as OpenSea.

Sid: In simple terms, Matic helps the Ethereum scale! Any dapp — game or otherwise can leverage Matic sidechains to achieve scale in a secure and user-friendly manner. Decentraland has long been Matic’s partner and its marketplace will be deployed on Matic Network.
Battle Racers needed a fast and easy to use environment for their players and Matic provides that and much more!

There are many partnerships listed on your website. However, can you explain the nature of these partnerships and the respective implications of these partnerships on data? More precisely, when will Data start benefiting from these partnerships? 

Patrick: Let me start with the obvious one: We chose Matic as our tech partner because we decided to use their sidechain for our game. Our game is going to be inside the Decentraland, so it makes perfect sense to go with Matic. This enables us to handle transactions in DCL with Mana directly.

Moreover, we’ve teamed up with decentralized games, such as CryptoKitties and Axie Infinities to attract a wider audience of players and leverage on each other communities.
 

The Future Plan — for Battle Racers and the future of Blockchain Gaming

What do you see Battle Racers in one year? And what’s your thoughts on the future of blockchain gaming, in 3-5 years? 

Patrick: As a wise old boomer named Yoda once put it: “Difficult to see. Always in motion is the future.” This is especially true for early technologies like blockchain.

As Gabby already mentioned before, we’re still at an early stage in terms of adoption and the user experience has to become a lot smoother and frictionless, which is also one of the reasons we love working with Matic because they are working hard on making that happen.

On the gaming side we firmly believe that once it has matured further, there will be a gradual shift towards mobile, which is not a real surprise to anyone. 3-5 years seems to be a good estimate of when the time and industry will be ripe for that move. We want to be at the forefront of that move and are already planning to build a mobile offspring of Battle Racers and are starting development of it in 2020. In the meantime, we are committed to making the game happen on Decentraland and Browser.
 

Thank you the team for joining us and delivering such an inspiring AMA session. Stay tuned for more!

Check out previous AMAs here.